A SEQUEL to I Can't Live Without Her
by Concolor44
Summary: I read and loved RosettaStone123's story. This is my take on what Jinx would have done following the events of that tale. Rated for images and suicide.


A SEQUEL  
to  
RosettaStone123's 'I Can't Live Without Her'

By Concolor44

. . .

. . .

. . .

_Author's Note: This is the first of what will, I imagine, become a series of sequels. There are so many terrific stories on this site that have given my Muse something to chew on, and I finally decided to do something about it. This is my take on what Jinx would have done after the events of "I Can't Live Without Her"._

_. . ._

_. . ._

_. . ._

_**NOTE!**_

_**THIS IS A SEQUEL!**_

_**It does not stand alone!**_

_**Do not, I repeat,**_

_**DO NOT READ THIS STORY**_

_**until after you have read**_

"_**I Can't Live Without Her".**_

_To find it, go to Cartoons, then Teen Titans, then set the filters to sort by Update Date, Rating = M, and Jinx and Raven for the characters. It will be about midway down the first page._

. . .

. . .

. . .

_So much blood._

_It soaked the towel. It dripped off the edge of the cot. It coated my hands._

_Her blood._

_Raven's blood._

_I couldn't – I __wouldn't__ believe it._

_She drew another ragged breath, and pink froth gathered at the corner of her mouth. Her voice was barely a whisper. "… Jinx …"_

_In one way, I was just … numb. This situation overwhelmed my ability to understand it. She __couldn't__ be dying. It wasn't possible. Surely this was just a bad dream. I had to get us both to wake up. "Please stay with me."_

_On the other hand … it was all too real. The woman I loved was going to die, here, now, in my arms._

"_I can't."_

_Those two words broke me. The reality of what was happening hit me like a maul, and the universe suddenly condensed to just her face. I watched, dumbstruck, as the light went out of her beautiful eyes, her breathing slowed, the labored pulse under my fingers stuttered … and stopped._

"_**NOOOOOOOOO!"**_

. . .

I landed heavily on my right side, tangled up in the sheet like a mummy, and a sudden flurry of hex blasts reduced it to charred fibers. Breathing hard, I stared around the room, then looked at my hands. Then I pressed them to my face.

Stupid nightmare.

I would not cry. I had done with crying some weeks ago.

Steeling myself, I stood and squinted over at the clock. Three-thirty.

Crap.

All of four hours since I turned out the light. I knew from experience that I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. I'd had this same dream enough times now that it was a routine. I headed down to the gym. Robin would show up to keep me company in an hour or so. We'd probably spar for a while, if I wasn't already too tired by then.

The other Titans have been great. Really supportive. Considering that I'd helped kick them all out of their tower some three years earlier, they were freakin' fantastic. But then, they were going through much the same sort of grieving that I was. We cut each other a lot of slack.

The salient difference between them and me, though, was that I was going to do something about it.

I pushed open the double doors, and the lights, sensing movement, came on. Going over to the punching bag, I stretched and took a few experimental swings before starting in on it.

The bag lasted about eight minutes.

I was breathing hard, but not winded, as I walked to the floor-level control panel and hit a button. The hard matting under the ruined bag irised open, the hanger assembly sank into it, there was a series of thumps and clicks, and then it rose again, a new bag in place. Stone had installed this feature about a month earlier. We went through a lot of bags these days, especially Robin.

See, here's the thing: Madame Rouge was still out there. She was still targeting Titans, too. Since ambushing and … um, murdering Ra- … Raven …

Damn. Give me a minute.

… Right. Ground and center.

Okay. Since the murder, she and Mallah had put Speedy in a coma, had cost Argent her left arm to the elbow, and had killed Hotspot. Between us and the Justice League, the rest of the Brotherhood (with a few exceptions) had been recaptured. And this time they weren't just put on ice.

We handed over Psimon, Billy Numerous, Phobia, and Mumbo to J'onn J'onzz, who went into their heads and freakin' _**deleted**_ their powers. They're all in with the general prisoners now.

Zatanna made a close examination of Cinderblock and found out he was nothing more than a magically-animated statue. So she un-animated him. Now he's a decoration in the lobby of some big cement company back East. Then she went through the same song-and-dance with the Puppet King, but it turns out he actually had a soul. She removed it and imprisoned it in a gem, and I guess he'll just stay there. None of my lookout.

Adonis and Gizmo and Johnny Rancid don't have any real powers anyway, so they just keep the three of 'em in a hard-labor chain gang, and keep 'em AWAY from any technology more sophisticated than nail clippers. No worries there.

Aqualad took Trident back to Atlantis. I heard he got executed.

Mammoth – heh – well, my old teammate decided to lift a leaf outta my book, and struck up some sorta bargain with the League. He's off-planet somewhere with Green Lantern. I wish him luck.

General Immortus was out of the picture. He had been deemed too great a threat to humanity to be allowed to stay on Earth, and so Superman had flown him out to Jupiter and just dropped him into the atmosphere. That may or may not have killed him, but it _**definitely**_ contained him. And Plasmus was dead. He'd somehow gotten knocked unconscious during a battle with Green Arrow, reverted to human, and then fallen nearly a hundred meters to the pavement. Nobody really thought that was an accident, but then again, nobody said anything about it either. Good riddance, I say.

And The Brain? That's the best part, so far. He's gone senile. See, nobody is really sure just how old he is, and he's been 'disembodied' for decades. That's hard on a delicate organ, especially one that might be pushing eighty or ninety. J'onn says the most recent freezing he went through was probably more than he could take, and that there's not much left in there. He spends his time sitting on a shelf at the prison, talking to no one about some non-existent (we think) grandchild and wondering why she never comes by to play anymore.

But … yeah. Rouge was still free. Rouge and Mallah.

And I intended to fix that little problem.

True to form, after I'd killed another hour – and three more punching bags – Robin showed up.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Stone's door was open, so I just knocked once on the frame.

He glanced up, saw me, and gave his head a little toss to tell me to come on in. I leaned on the back of his chair.

"What's on your mind, Pinky?"

"I think you know."

He swiveled around, depriving me of my support, and gave me a steady gaze. "Besides the prelim paper, I don't have anything back yet from S.T.A.R., if that's what you want to know."

"I don't need the particulars. I just want to be sure that what was done to her is what I _think_ was done to her."

He nodded, reached over to his desk, and pulled an envelope out of a stack. "Here."

"Thanks."

"I hope it helps."

I nodded absently as I walked out, flipping through the envelope's contents.

Back in my room, I read through everything. Then I smiled grimly to myself. It was as I had fervently hoped.

Laura deMille had been through a lot of changes in her life, before and after becoming Madame Rouge. Some of them, she hadn't planned on. Some had even been against her will. But I didn't really care. Right now – and for the past several years – she was a cruel, calculating, sadistic bitch, and seemed to revel in it. She'd tortured Raven before killing her. Same with Hotspot. And if Argent had lived, it was only because Rouge had been mistaken when she thought the girl would bleed out after she'd knocked her cold and cut off her arm.

She deserved to die.

The Marines have a saying. It goes something like, 'It is up to God to judge the evil men who come before Him. It is up to us to arrange the meeting.'

Yeah. Sounds about right.

I flipped to the third page of the report and re-read a couple of paragraphs. The first time The Brain experimented on her, he'd given her the ability to stretch her body and mold her features so that she could impersonate other people, and that had been good enough for a while. Then he tinkered with her basic metabolism and fixed it so that she regenerated damage at a fairly high rate. Then he made her more durable. Some five years ago, the state of the art had developed to the point that he could produce nano-machines to supplement her abilities, and he injected her with them. Now? Now her body was about sixty percent nanites. That explained how she could survive being crushed and frozen and burned and shattered into little pieces. The machines always reassembled her.

Well. It just so happens that my hexes are particularly effective at screwing up machines. It explains why she was so susceptible to my attacks.

It explains why I will be able to kill her.

The others don't know. They think I'm going after her to catch her and bring her back.

In a word … No.

When I find her … she dies. They considered Immortus dangerous? Pfft. Concerning Rouge, they haven't really thought it through. No prison can hold her. No current official method of execution could kill her.

But I can. And I will. I slid the papers back into the envelope, laid it on my nightstand, and headed down to lunch.

. . .

. . .

. . .

I'd found an unlikely ally in Green Arrow. He was sympathetic to my goals, and (if anything) even less inclined to give quarter to hardened killers than I was: "Bunch o' parasites. Don't know why Supes don't just toss 'em ALL into the sun. Nothin' but takin' up somebody else's space and usin' up somebody else's oxygen, an' sooner or later some of 'em will break out. Or the stupid, stupid courts will let 'em go. An' we'll be right back where we started, only more innocent people will be dead."

I could get behind that philosophy.

I figured out that there were really only two reasons that he stayed affiliated with the JLI and played it (usually) on the straight and narrow. One, he really liked all the perks that come with membership, from the cool digs to the Watchtower to the generous stipend. And, two … Black Canary. Yeah, he's got it BAD for her.

I could understand THAT, too.

So when I started makin' noises about wanting something exoskeletal to supplement my wardrobe, he jumped right on it. We spent a few afternoons and evenings going over various designs and such, and in a week flat we turned in our specs to the Military Support Division of Wayne Enterprises. Yeah, it's funny: the owner/president/CEO is Bruce Wayne, this total **fop** of a playboy who can't even tell which is the dangerous end of a gun, and yet his company designs some of the most totally wicked arms and systems on the planet. He must have good people working for him is all I can figure. Green Arrow laughed hard when I voiced my opinion on that. Guess he agrees.

It only took them four days to fabricate my suit. To say that I was elated would not stretch the point much. It was light, supple in all the right places, and yet would stop any blade and most projectiles. Plus, it had a stealth mode that let me blend in to any background. And a built-in transceiver in the helmet. And fifteen minutes of breathable air.

Heh. I couldn't _wait_ to go hunting.

. . .

. . .

. . .

It didn't turn out to be quite as straightforward as I'd hoped.

In the first place, about a week after I got my suit, the military found Mallah. I think it was the Marines. Force Recon? Don't remember. Not important. For some reason they had a shoot-on-sight order, and the sniper took him down, as they like to put it, 'with extreme prejudice'. And unless you're Superman, a 250 grain copper-jacketed boat-tail coming in just under the ear at 900 meters per second is definitely gonna pop your cork for you. My only regret was that I wasn't the one pulling the trigger.

So. That meant that Rouge was working solo. And she could look like anybody, blend in anywhere. Tracking her was going to be next to impossible.

So I decided to see if _she_ would track _me_.

I know she's got a 'special place in her heart' for me. I was, after all, the one that finally stopped her in that last battle with the Brotherhood. I'm actually a little upset that she hasn't come after me yet. As far as I know. But then, I've been sticking pretty close to the Tower ever since Rav- … since she … she murdered …

Um. … Hang on. Just …

Yeah. Got to maintain. Got a job to do.

No crying.

Hooooosh.

Right. Rouge has to die. I'm not looking past that point. Not yet.

But I can't let that distract me.

A road trip seemed like just the thing. I'd go visit the Titans East. And I'd travel by car. My official story was that I needed the time alone to clear my head and think over my future. And I let slip the fact that I was taking the trip to an _**awful**_ lot of people. Clerks. Bag-boys. A hairdresser. The bookstore chick. A bus driver. Couple of cops.

I felt relatively confident that if Rouge was keeping tabs on me at all, she'd know my plans. And if she didn't try to take me on my trip over, I'd give her another chance a couple of weeks later on the return.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Stone arranged for a sedan for me. I took I-80 out of Cali and stayed on it, driving at a steady two klicks under the limit. I'd never done this before. Not in a car, anyhow. Taking a cross-country trip was something I'd brought up once or twice, but Ra- … um, Raven …

… Damn.

Sorry. She wasn't, um, wasn't really much for travel.

Yeah.

I probably would have enjoyed the scenery, especially through the Rockies, if I hadn't been primed 24/7 to fend off an ambush from a shape-shifting super-villain.

I stopped at a Travelodge in Elko, Nevada the first night, and at the Days Inn in Evanston, Wyoming the next. I chose small towns because I wanted to minimize the possibility of collateral damage in case our fight got really wild. I knew she wasn't above using some bystander as a shield or a distraction. I made it all the way across Wyoming the third day, drove on through Cheyenne, and stayed at a really dilapidated motel in Burns that night. A tent would have been more comfortable, but I wasn't going to give Rouge any more of an advantage than I had to.

It was the very definition of uneventful.

I crossed Nebraska the fourth day and Iowa the fifth, stopping at the tiny burg of Geneseo, Illinois and taking a room at what seemed to be the only hotel in town, a Super8.

The place was practically empty, with all of three other cars in the lot when I got there. Beats me how a hotel could survive in that location, halfway between Nowhere and Perdition. While the shriveled, chain-smoking skeleton manning the desk maintained that they _**did**_ have non-smoking rooms, the one he gave me _**reeked**_ of old ashtray. I have a sensitive nose, and I can tell when 'air freshener' has been substituted for 'clean'. I opened the windows and left them open. It helped a little.

I didn't ask about a second-floor room. Rouge wouldn't have any more trouble with that than she would with the ground floor, and I wanted as many escape routes as possible. And I'd requested to be on the front of the Inn, where I could see the parking lot. There was a thin line of trees and then a couple of houses on the other side, and you recall what I said about collateral damage? Yeah.

I'd developed a routine: early supper around five, then a half-hour-to-forty-five-minute walk around town, then go back to my room and relax with my Kindle for an hour or two, then shower and put on my suit (yeah, I slept in it, don't judge), then in bed by nine or so. I'd be up at dawn the next day. Tomorrow I'd see if I could make it to the Ohio border, weather permitting. The forecast called for thunderstorms and possible hail around mid-day, and I didn't want to drive through that.

Turned out to be a non-issue.

The four nights previous, I'd slept fairly well. No dreams to speak of. But tonight I had that recurring nightmare again, and it woke me just shy of three o'clock.

I knew the drill. Sighing heavily, I tossed on some sweats and a hoody and started to climb out the window to take a walk. (The Inn had a pool, but I'd been down to see it and … well, no thanks.) I paused on the sill and nibbled my lip, then went back in and got my Ka-Bar. You never know, right?

The night was overcast, cool and breezy, but I was comfortable. With a nicely wind-tight suit, some sturdy Doc Marten's, and my hands warm in the hoody's pockets, I just marched steadily along the road, due west out of town on US-6. It occurred to me that this would be an ideal place for Rouge to attack … but apparently she disagreed.

This whole area is farmland, and très agricultural. Once away from town, the un-lit houses were at least a kilometer apart, usually more, and the flat, recently-harvested fields of probably-corn stretched off into the darkness, beyond even my night vision. No streetlights broke the monotony. The sameness soon became somewhat hypnotic. It was like walking through nothingness, like being stuck in some dark dimension or …

… or like …

I stopped, blinking slowly and deliberately, as a large, cold chunk of granite settled firmly into my chest. Then I looked up, into the deadened sky.

… it was like when Rae would teleport us.

Yes. It was very like that.

I don't know whether there were other outside influences, or if I was just _**that**_ tired of fighting it, but when the tears came, this time I didn't resist. I was facing into the wind, and I knew, somewhere down in my mind, that my cheeks were going to get thoroughly chapped. But I just couldn't dredge up enough volition to rummage around for my supply of give-a-crap.

I started walking, slowly, back the way I'd come.

She was dead.

The woman who completed me, who filled in those blank spots in my soul, was dead. I thought I had internalized that at some point in the preceding weeks … but apparently not.

She was dead.

The weight of that concept came to rest on my shoulders, making it hard to breathe, much less walk. I slowed to a desultory shuffle.

Raven, my one love, the light of my eyes, the reason I got up each day, was dead.

Nothing I did would change that fact. Killing Rouge wouldn't bring Raven back. Nothing would. I would never see her again in this life.

Not in this life.

I wondered a little about the next one.

Me an' Stone, we'd had a few long talks about that. With what happened around that Trigon thing, an' bein' acquainted with dimensional travelers and a few beings that had been resurrected and the odd demi-deity, none of us had any doubt that there WAS an afterlife. What it consisted of, though, was a matter of some debate.

Raven … was dead. Her soft fingers would never again run through my hair, her sweet lips would never toy with my earlobe. I would only see her stunning eyes, only hear her loving voice in my memory.

I choked a bit on the salty sting of tears running down my throat, and stumbled a little.

She was dead. And I wasn't.

A scene skittered across my mind. Once last year this radical priest guy showed up at the Tower. Had a few hangers-on with him. He was there, believe it or not, to exorcise Raven. We listened to his spiel for a while, watched him do his censor-waving and holy-water flinging. Stone treated the whole thing as a joke. Robin wanted to have him arrested for trespassing. I wanted to blast his skinny ass. But Raven, his target, went into the kitchen, put some cookies on a plate, poured a glass of lemonade, and took it down to him. I don't know what they talked about. None of us could hear. But he left. And she was smiling when she got back.

If there's a Heaven, I'm sure she's there, demon blood or not.

So where did that leave me?

I noticed I had stopped walking. I sank to my knees and just slumped there in the middle of the road …

… in the middle of the night …

… in the middle of nowhere …

Alone.

I was alone. I would always be alone.

I also noticed I had my Ka-Bar in my hand, and stared at it for a few moments. I didn't remember drawing it. But, come to think on it, it could be useful.

My suit has Velcro closures, to make it easy to get it on quickly. That works both ways. I pulled open the wrist clasp on my left arm and pulled the fabric back, exposing my forearm. What's that saying? It's down the road, not across the street? I almost chuckled. Probably would have if I hadn't been crying so hard.

I placed the tip of the blade against my skin, noting absently how cold it felt. The wind had picked up some, and my bare skin ruffled up in gooseflesh.

Well. What must be done should be done quickly. I held my arm out straight, steeled myself …

… and a long black spike rammed down through the back of my right hand, knocking the knife away and pinning the hand effectively to the pavement.

"You vill not rob me of ze pleasure of killing you myzelf."

Rouge.

The transformation was instantaneous and massive: my entire burden of pain and guilt and loneliness and sorrow and despair flared up instead into a white heat of hatred so intense I couldn't even feel the ripped flesh and scarred bones in my hand. Instead I unloaded a colossal hex blast at the tentacle-like limb impaling me. It snapped loose, leaving about a meter of it still on me, and _**that**_ slumped into a silvery slurry in a couple of seconds. Rouge backpedaled, screaming in sudden pain and surprise.

A feral grin took control of my face. I had her number, and we both knew it.

I stood, clenching my damaged hand into a fist and shaking off the residual decommissioned nanites as my eyes took on a dangerous glow.

Her own eyes wide in shock, she nevertheless sent her remaining arm at me in a panicked attack. She was fast. I'll give her that. She'd been fast enough to cause Kid Flash a lot of trouble, and just then she'd decided that dispatching me as quickly as possible was the best plan. And I couldn't dodge the blow, either. It hit me in the center of my chest … right over the most well-armored section of my suit. Yeah, it knocked me back an' it hurt like hell, but it didn't poke any holes in me, and that gave me the opportunity to grab it. I held on tight and channeled as much hex energy as I could into it.

Rouge screamed like some swamp monster out of a bad sci-fi movie and went into a frenetic spasm. She was a LOT stronger than I was, and hanging on meant I made rapid acquaintance with the pavement several times. But I wasn't finished. I pumped blast after blast into her flesh, and with each strike she got weaker.

See, here's the thing: I don't target _**people**_ with my hexes, except for very small ones. Small hexes, that is, not small people. The human body is a relatively delicate mechanism, and if any of several thousand different systems or processes stops working, the whole thing will stop working. Disrupt the function of the Isles of Langerhans? The target develops diabetes. Alter the way the Krebs Cycle works in the cells? Death is pretty much instant. Hitting someone directly with a powerful probability-altering matrix is almost guaranteed to kill him, sooner or later.

Well … ordinarily. With Rouge, all bets were off. Technically she wasn't human anymore, and despite my earlier promises to myself, I wasn't at all sure I even _could_ kill her.

I don't know how many times I zapped her. Eight? A dozen? Whatever. At some point she went limp, her arm retracted, and I pitched over onto my face on the side of the road.

In the middle of battle while the adrenaline was pumping (and I can pump a lot) the only thing my tunnel vision let me understand was that I had to keep hexing her. It was total fight-or-flight, and I damn sure wasn't running away. But once I'd won, once it was obvious that she had no more fight left in her, I began to realize how badly she'd hurt me.

At least one of my legs was broken, and the other kneecap felt like it might be. Every breath was a chorus of razors, so I knew I had some busted ribs. And for some reason I couldn't see out of my right eye. Then there was my speared hand, which hurt like a bitch when I thought about it. And I think that shoulder was dislocated.

I lay there, panting as shallowly as I could, and a few things ran through my mind.

First off, I had done it. I took out Rouge, the last and meanest of the Brotherhood, and I did it by myself. That meant no more Titans would die by her hand. I wasn't sure whether or not she was dead yet, but she sure as hell wasn't going anywhere. If all I'd done was clean her clock for her, the Justice League could stick her in a cell on the Moon or something.

Second … well … I had done it. That meant it was done. Finished. I'd accomplished my goal.

That meant I didn't really have anything left to live for. That concept rattled around in my head for a bit, finally settling into a soggy sort of resignation. I realized that I was very, very tired.

I was bleeding here and there, but nothing arterial, so I probably wouldn't bleed to death. That meant I'd have to do away with myself later because just right then I didn't have enough energy to turn over, much less hunt for my knife.

More pains, from half a hundred sources, made themselves known as I came down off the adrenaline rush, driving home the point that I was in no shape to do anything but make pitiful little noises.

The sun would be up in about four hours. If I hadn't died from shock by then, some farmer would find us and I could tell him to call the Titans. I'd left my communicator back in my room, and subconsciously I knew that was no accident. I guess I should try to hang on, for _that_ long at least, just so …

A low moan grabbed every scintilla of my attention. I turned my head as far as I could.

Rouge was sitting up. I hadn't killed her at all.

The panic was back, full force, but my body was damaged too badly to do anything about it. Any movement at all was torture, and it was getting steadily worse.

I couldn't take my eyes off her. If she came at me, maybe I could get off another hex blast, but I knew instinctively that it would not be much of one. My mind ran in high-velocity circles.

She had her face in her left hand and moaned again. Then she lifted her head and our eyes met.

This was not the imperious Madame Rouge I had known and admired and feared. She looked more like a lost little girl. Her brow drew up in lines, a few blinks jumped by, and she said, "Zhinx? What are you doing here?"

… Huh?

I wasn't at all sure how to answer that. So I said nothing.

"You are hurt. How did … wait." A look of horror slid over her features. "No! NO!" Jumping to her feet led immediately to her falling back down. I noted absently that most of her right arm was still missing. I guess I'd disabled her nanites. Tears formed and flowed down her face. "No. No. No. …" She chanted the word over and over like a mantra while rocking back and forth.

Apparently my hexes also had fried her brain.

Her stare fixed on me. She drew a long breath and then another, straightened up, and asked, "How long?"

I stared right back. Maybe I could play for time? She seemed pretty out of it. Maybe someone would come along before she decided to kill me. "How long … what?"

"How long have I been like zis?"

"… Uh … Like what?"

"Wiss ze evil one in charge."

That was when I recalled something from her file that said she might have a dual (at least) personality. "Um … you mean, how long have you been a villain?"

"Yes, exactly."

"… Years. Several years. Better than a decade."

Even in the darkness I could see her blanch. "… Ten years?"

"Probably more."

She got up on her knees and one arm and crawled slowly over to me. "How did we get here?"

"Well … I drove. I don't know how you got here."

"… I remember you."

"Ah-huh." Carrying on a conversation when three-quarters of your body is screaming at you in pain is not a hobby for the faint of heart, let me tell you. "From where?"

"… I … am not … sure. A … school? Is zat right?"

It would seem the two sides of her psyche don't play well together. "Maybe."

She looked at my twisted limbs, the cuts and contusions, and drew a sharp breath that sounded suspiciously like a sob. "I did zis to you."

"Uh, yeah." _And are you gonna finish me off now?_

She'd been on her knees. Her butt plopped back to the ground and she just stared at me for a bit. "Have I killed anyone?"

_Only the most important person in the universe._ "Yes. Yes, you have. More than one. And you liked it."

Her wail of sorrow startled me, both with its suddenness and its intensity. She climbed to her feet, swaying a little. "I must stop her. I must. I must." That was when she noticed my knife, where it had fallen after her first attack. She stumbled over to it, bent to pick it up, and fell on her face. Her lack of an arm made the collapse that much more awkward, and she was obviously in a great deal of pain. But she rolled over and fumbled for the knife again.

What was she doing?

She looked at it for a moment, like she was confused by it or something. Then she reversed her grip and placed the tip against her chest.

"What are you doing?"

"I must stop her! I cannot allow zis to continue, and while I have control …" She looked down at her chest and re-positioned the knife slightly.

"That's gonna hurt."

She caught my gaze again. Apart from the image staring back at me from my mirror each morning, I couldn't remember ever seeing a more tortured expression. "It will not hurt for long."

"Opening a vein is quicker, an' it don't hurt as much."

She considered that briefly and nodded, then moved the blade up to her neck. I knew how sharp it was. She likely wouldn't feel a thing.

"Do me a favor?"

That confused her again. "What?"

"Do me first?"

"… _**What?"**_

"You took away my main reason for living."

A look of anguish passed over her face. "I did?"

"You did."

"Who?"

"Raven."

"… Raven is … dead?"

"Yes, damn it. And I'd like to be with her now, if you don't mind."

She just stared at me for upwards of half a minute. Then, as well as she could on three limbs while holding a knife, she crawled back over next to me. She pushed the hair back from my face where it had stuck to some blood. "You are badly injured."

"I hadn't noticed."

"You are very brave." She nodded once, a short, definite gesture. "Yes. Too brave to die."

"… What?"

"I will not kill you. Zere is too much blood on my hands already."

Damn it. "Will you please just put me out of my misery? I have nothing left to live for."

She traced my cheek. The action was almost tender. "You have everysing to live for. You have life. You have friends. You have ze memory of your love." She shook her head. "I have never had love. You must learn to appreciate it. Because I will not kill you." She smiled at me. And then in one sharp motion she drew the knife across her throat and threw it far into the field.

"No! NONONONONO! DAMN IT! YOU BITCH!"

The smile was still there after she had slumped to the earth, her eyes closed.

I lay there and cursed for several minutes. Cursed and cried and hurt and hurt and hurt. But my metahuman metabolism wouldn't be denied, and I didn't die, no matter how much I wanted to. I was still lying right there when a truck drove up about half an hour before dawn.

. . .

. . .

. . .

It's been almost a month since Rouge offed herself in front of me beside a road in the middle of nowhere. I suppose there are all sorts of analogies and comparisons and lessons and crap that I could take away from the situation, if I wanted to get philosophical about it.

I don't. Philosophy isn't my thing.

So … yeah. Four weeks. Four weeks of mostly lying in the infirmary while Stone fussed over me like a mother hen with its only chick. Boy, THAT got old in a hurry. But, really, it's kinda nice, having someone care about you that much. The other Titans have been almost as bad (or good … take your pick). Star spends an hour or two with me every day. BB and I have this epic checkers tournament going. And Robin … well. He talks with me. A lot. He talks about the Brotherhood and Rouge and the H.I.V.E. and Slade. He talks about the Titans, original and honorary, and how much they mean to him. He talks about leadership and the Batman and his parents and being in the circus. And he talks about Raven. He talks about her a LOT.

He and Raven were really, really close. She'd mentioned that a time or two, but he elaborated for me. She'd saved his life (and maybe his eternal existence) by putting a tiny piece of her soul inside him. It gave them a sort of unbreakable bond. I don't really think he was as close to anyone else on the planet, not even Star, and _**they're**_ makin' noises about marriage.

These people are my friends. More than that, they're my family. That's something I have _**never**_ had before, and I'm learning, as Laura deMille suggested, how to appreciate it.

It's been a revelation. I've learned a great ol' big heapin' pile of stuff about my teammates that I never knew before. And it's given me a lot to chew on.

I will tell you this, though: since that night, I haven't had the nightmare, even once. Maybe it was the closure of knowing that Raven's killer was dead. Maybe Raven reached across the dimensions and took them from me. Maybe it was the head trauma. I don't know, and anymore I don't really care. I can still remember her. I remember my Raven.

I will always miss her. She took a not-so-little part of me with her when she died. But as long as I remember her, she'll never truly be gone.

. . .

. . .

. . .

_A/N: Yes, this is all RosettaStone123's fault, so you can thank or blame her as you see fit. ;-D_


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